Is China’s Environmental Governance Model a win-win for Energy Conservation and Economic Development?

ABSTRACT

Since its industrialization, China has been continuously promoting environmental governance, and it is worth studying whether this measure has been effective. In this paper, we use industrial pollution control to represent China’s environmental governance. Further, we use growth drag caused by energy consumption to describe a win-win situation for energy conservation and economic development. This paper theoretically analyzes the impact of environmental governance on growth drag by incorporating the former into the growth drag model. Thereafter, using data from 283 cities for the period between 2003 and 2017, this paper applies the dynamic panel data model to investigate whether China’s industrial pollution control can achieve a win-win situation and its transmission mechanism. The results show that industrial pollution control can alleviate growth drag, implying that China’s environmental governance can achieve a win-win situation. However, the effect is more significant in Eastern China and areas with high industrial pollution control intensity. The transmission mechanism analysis shows that industrial pollution control achieves a win-win situation by improving technological innovation, promoting human capital accumulation, and optimizing manufacturing development, of which improving technological innovation is the most significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental governance
• win-win
• energy conservation
• economic development

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the linguistic assistance provided by SCRIBENDI (www.scribendi.com) during the preparation of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation of China [18ZDA047].